So, why are these words bunched together in the same phrase? Anyone who came up with the obvious, they have a neat arithmetic progression of 5, 6 and 7 letters, please go to nerd management training. They all begin with a hard G is an observation of such breathtaking obviousness, not to mention triteness, that it might just be the right answer, but it isn’t. Tacky attempt at alliteration? Ok, give up? Greed begets growth which begets garbage. They are like a three generation dysfunctional family, all living in the house that Ponzi built, and goading each other on to ever greater achievements of dubious value.
The most obvious example of this obnoxious G family’s presence and catastrophic influence is the never-ending financial crisis that burst upon the world in 2008. The banks were growing bigger and bigger and they needed fuel to keep the pace going. They gave sufficient financial incentive to a mercenary army of mortgage brokers to keep on extending mortgages to worse and worse credit risks, the famous NINJA – No Income, No Job, and no Assets – borrowers. Those worthless mortgages were packaged into fancy, complex securities (is that the right word? It seems insecurities is a better description of the garbage that was being peddled by the big investment banks), and gushed over with grade A stamps from the credit rating firms entrusted to be the first to sniff out foul financial odours.
Universities are another great example of the triple G phenomenon. The business model is not that complex for most institutions of higher learning: student fees are the major source of income, whether through high priced tuition or some combination of per student government subsidies plus lower student fees. At some point, if the university is to grow, it needs more students. Eventually, to keep feeding the beast, standards will have to be lowered through some combination of laxer grading, easier curriculum, lower entrance requirement and accepting more students from secondary schools known to have easier grading standards. This should alert those communities debating tuition fee freezes, like in Quebec, that the university feeding frenzy has now turned its attention to chaff.
In the larger temporal scheme of things, the ugly G’s are creating a quality of life transformation which appears to be preparing the ground for the arrival of those four well known horsemen who prefer to go unnamed. The calculus of selling stuff is the very portrait of simplicity: make it cheaper and more will be purchased. So, how do you do that? There aren’t really many ways. The two principle avenues are not very attractive when the real costs are considered. Either lower the quality of the goods, making them cheaper to produce, and so keep selling prices lower – the direct road to garbage. “Since the 1980’s China-made products have almost always been categorized as high volume, low cost and low quality.” Many would have you believe this is about to change, that China will be offering the same low priced products but of higher quality. They might, but to do so it’ll have to begin its own offshoring programs to find labour willing to work for lower than the slave wages they now pay and it will also have to convince the producers of those goods to accept lower profits, an unlikely outcome.
The second way is to lower the cost of those inputs required to produce the goods. Labour is already squeezed to the bone and ripping any more flesh from its body will only result in more misery, not lower costs. There’s only so much you can suck from labour. Energy, on the other hand is an entirely different matter. As long as you don’t have to worry about greenhouse gases there is an abundance of cheap coal about and the more of that you burn, rather than the more expensive stuff like lower emissions natural gas, the lower are your costs of production, the lower your prices and, like magic, the more you sell. But, you guessed it, the downside to “China’s Soaring Coal Consumption,” is that it “Poses a Climate Change Challenge.” More production of lower cost, lower quality goods will turn our environment into just so much garbage. It is happening as you read this piece. The air quality in major Chinese industrial cities is a huge source of early mortality.
Entire Civilizations, the Sumerians, the Mayans, the Easter Islanders, among others, have gone the route of Greed, Growth and finally ended up as just so much Garbage. There is nothing wrong with Greed and Growth, per se. Humans evolved to be greedy and selfish to survive in a resource scarce world. It is when they begin to explosively feed on each other that problems arise. Alas, until we find a way to identify when we have what we need and so stop there, humans seem doomed to never have enough.
